Uncertainty

“I’m really burned out on my research.  Is there something else I can work on for a while?”  So began my conversation with Steve Schulman, the professor with whom I was working while earning my Ph.D. in pharmaceutical sciences from the University of Florida.  He grinned at me, spun his office chair around, grabbed several bottles of obscure chemicals off a shelf behind his desk, handed them to me, and said, “Study these.”  After discussing a few things with him I thought, “OK, this sounds better.”  Each chemical was of questionable purity, and so step one was to purify them.  I commenced with recrystallization and then moved on to preparative column chromatography.  When all was said and done I had isolated beautiful crystals of each chemical, and my analysis of them demonstrated that they were pure.  This was enjoyable and relaxing, and I commenced acquiring spectra of them.  I measured how much visible and ultraviolet light each absorbed, and then measured their fluorescence properties.  By this point in my graduate education I was pretty good at this kind of work, and our laboratory instruments were working beautifully.

“This is strange,” I thought as I looked at the fluorescence spectrum of 9-aminofluorene.  There was an odd feature that raised a red flag.  “Is this stuff really pure?”  So I did some more analysis.  Trust me, it was pure, but we had some work to do in order to explain why that unusual feature was there.  Steve suggested that I repeat the fluorescence measurements with 9-aminofluorene dissolved in different solvents.  That turned out to be a great idea, and I observed that the wavelengths at which the anomalous feature occurred varied regularly with the properties of the liquid that the chemical was dissolved in.  I won’t bore you with all of the details, but ultimately we explained this discovery by proposing the existence of an excited-state twisted intramolecular charge transfer conformer and published the results in the journal Chemical Physics Letters in June of 1982.  This about a year before I completed my graduate program.  I felt rejuvenated, I went back to my main research project, and we all lived happily ever after.  In other words, we published a series of articles dealing with my “real” research.  Consequently, my dissertation was pretty well bulletproof when I defended it orally before the professors on my graduate committee.  They still made me sweat out in the hall for what seemed like an eternity (a whole 20 minutes), but then my professor came out and congratulated me.  Oh, the sweet taste of victory!!  My nightmares about graduate school persisted for only a few more years; by then bad dreams about teaching college chemistry had set in.

How many kinds of scientific observations did I make during the “I need a break” project?  I visually observed each chemical before purifying it, and there were telltale signs that impurities were present.  I also visually observed multiple colored bands during the column chromatography experiments that informed me about impurities.  Analyzing the absorption and emission of light by the purified 9-aminofluorene with spectrometers told me things that humans can’t detect with their senses.  Nevertheless, we still call these measurements “observations.”

Every observation we make is limited either by the ability of the observer or the technology being used.  In other words, every observation has some uncertainty built into it.  Scientists can estimate uncertainty using statistical models.  For example, when determining how much ultraviolet light a chemical absorbs at a particular wavelength we can estimate how well we can measure both the wavelength and the extent of light absorption.  Of course, the fact that we can make such estimates does not mean that we understand everything contributing to the uncertainty.  Please note that this is not the same thing as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, but I’ll leave that discussion to you and your local quantum theory scientist.

There is also uncertainty in entire scientific theories.  Scientists that develop a theory have confidence that they are on the right track, but sometimes others disagree.  Theories are not widely accepted unless they explain a lot of observations.  It’s easy to understand why scientists that have invested their lives in developing a theory aren’t easily won over to an alternative.  In such cases it takes both evidence and a better theory to convince them that they are wrong.  Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions does a fine job of explaining how this process works.  It also demonstrates that sometimes scientists are very wrong about things that they are very certain are very right.

Life’s circumstances present us with uncertainties.  Here are a few examples:

·       When will that noisy engine idler pulley seize up and have to be replaced?  Will I get stranded in the parking garage at school?  Will it just die in traffic?  Can it cause an accident?  A good mechanic can fix this in a jiffy, and then the uncertainty will evaporate.

·       When will I get a job?  Not so easy.

·       When I retire, will I have enough money to pay for medical bills?  Also not so easy.

And then there are uncertainties in relationships:

·       What is she thinking?  Does she like me?  Will I be able to see her again?

·       Why did he say that?  Why did he say it the way he did?  Will he ever understand me?

How do you cope with thoughts like this?  In almost 35 years of marriage to Carla I have found that she is very good at giving people the benefit of the doubt.  I like the way the Cambridge Idioms Dictionary defines it:  “To believe something good about someone, rather than something bad, when you have the possibility of doing either.”  Several weeks ago I discussed a situation with two people.  John (not his real name) immediately reacted very forcefully and emphatically stated (rather loudly), “What Brian said is not right!  It is…” and gave his version of things.  As it turned out, he had more recent knowledge than I did, but I was still taken aback by his reaction. Couldn’t he have explained it more nicely?  I thought his reaction might have been influenced by his circumstances.  And I also remembered that Carla has said, “Brian, sometimes you come across in ways that you don’t realize.”  Perhaps I came across to John in some way that elicited his negative reaction.  I chose to think these things about him rather than, “John is a jerk.”  The beautiful thing about giving him the benefit of the doubt is that I was able to relax and dismiss negative thoughts from my mind.

In a few weeks I’m going to have pelvic and abdominal CT scans in order to see if any lymph nodes look abnormal.  If they do, then I expect that Joe (Stephenson, my oncologist) and I will discuss treatment options.  If they don’t, then I expect that we’ll continue watchful waiting.  I have no way of predicting what will happen.  As I’ve shared before, it’s expected that my follicular lymphoma will at some time become more aggressive and require treatment.  Timeframe: Unknown.  None of us like these kinds of uncertainties.  Against this backdrop it seems odd that Christ said this:

 “Let not your hearts be troubled.”

(John 14:1)

This puts some responsibility for my state of mind squarely into my court.  As strange as it may sound to some, I personally know God.  Although I am familiar with who he is and how he thinks, there are still times when he does things that I don’t understand.  Nevertheless, he always has good reasons for what he does and what he allows to happen, even if that includes my getting cancer.  I’m giving God the benefit of the doubt.